


Paris

by minuanos



Category: If We Were Villains - M.L. Rio
Genre: F/F, pip/wren is there by shakespearean implication
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-19 01:54:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22003348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minuanos/pseuds/minuanos
Summary: "This is that banish'd haughty Montague,"she'd said earlier, and watched James flinch behind his mask,"that murder'd my love's cousin."
Relationships: Filippa Kosta & James Farrow, Filippa Kosta/Wren Stirling
Comments: 2
Kudos: 25





	Paris

She washes her face at the basin and Lady Macbeth slips into her head like she's seven again, trying on her father's coat that's two feet and a lifetime too big for her, a role she's toyed with but never touched in earnest, one she pushed away and locked deep inside her years ago back when she first realised things wouldn't change.

Her mask lies abandoned on the shelf- she tries to be neat, but not obvious. She knows where things are, where they're going, where they'll inevitably end up when she's too tired to put them back properly, but she doubts that anyone else could say the same. It gleams in the dim light, silver and black, purple touches bruise-dark in the shadows. When she was wearing it, she felt almost invisible; a wall made of silk and words, something else to hide her heart behind.

_"This is that banish'd haughty Montague_ ," she'd said earlier, and watched James flinch behind his mask, " _that murder'd my love's cousin."_ He stayed down as she approached him, crouching on his heels beside Wren's still body. " _Condemned villain, I do apprehend thee. Obey, and go with me, for thou must die."_

There was a pause, long enough for her to worry that he'd forgotten his line, and then he'd risen to his feet and stepped towards her, hand extended. " _I must indeed, and therefore I came hither_ ," he said, soft and wistful. " _Good gentle youth, tempt not a desperate man."_ She'd reached out to catch his arm almost unintentionally as the scene played out, and he'd twisted away, stumbling. " _Stay not; be gone! Live, and hereafter say a madman's mercy bade thee run away."_

(He'd told her to run before; a ghost in the night with blood on his hands. "You don't have to have seen me," he'd begged her, shaking so hard that the boathook swayed dangerously in his grip. "Go, go, forget it, please-"

And she'd stepped forwards, taken his arm and the bruises she'd known about for weeks, pressing hard enough to hurt, to pull him back. "Come inside," she'd said, and when he'd staggered, she'd put an arm round his waist like it was a dance and led him away.)

She hadn't seem him nor Wren after the performance ended; he'd helped her up when it ended, and they'd both left- together or not, she didn't know. It had been a strange party, more subdued than Halloween, the room aching from the tragedy of it all, restrained by the grandeur and the uneasy elegance of the masks. She'd watched the others for a while; Alexander, lounging by the drinks table, leering at the younger years while Oliver glared at him from across the room, Meredith, accepting dances and compliments alike until they bored her, all of them adrift.

A trace of fine glitter from the mask comes loose on her hands as she rinses them again, the water cool against her skin. A part of her thinks that it could wash it all away; the blood and the bruises and the tears, saltwater trails matting fine hair to faces while she tries to pick up the pieces. She pulls herself a little closer, a little colder, thinks of Wren and James, both of them worn thin under the lights. _Out, damned spot_. Let us be human again.

**Author's Note:**

> I have many feelings about the R&J scene, and Pip as Paris takes up several of them.


End file.
